


That Shadow Hiding from the World

by ThisDominionIsMine



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Pet Names, Sass, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 12:36:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/503599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisDominionIsMine/pseuds/ThisDominionIsMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An angel keeps turning up at the Roadhouse. Slight AU, obviously prior to Jo's death in S5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Shadow Hiding from the World

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted on Tumblr at thewinstonisin.

By the fifth or sixth time the angel saunters through the door, there’s a definite routine appearing. It sits at one end of the bar, drinks the oldest Scotch they can procure, paying in cash with no regard for the price, barely speaking except to order more. It watches Jo take hunters’ money at every variation of pool and darts imaginable – silently observes even when nobody’s up for getting their ass kicked and it’s just her lobbing knives at the wall – with the sort of dry amusement that one gets from watching someone be underestimated time and again.  
It never shows any desire to challenge her, which always makes Jo wonder what would happen if they did go up against each other at something. She doesn’t think angels have any real automatic aptitude for games. That being said, in her experience, angels don’t sit in human bars – nevermind hunter bars – and drink for fun, either. But this angel, settled just as comfortably into its vessel’s crow’s feet and glinting gray eyes as it is into the man’s thin black jacket, seems different.

Jo isn’t sure when or why she removed gender from her thoughts about angels. Maybe it’s all the crap she’s heard about wavelengths of celestial intent and true forms the size of the Chrysler Building making her cut out anything resembling humanity from her ideas about angels. Maybe’ it’s a sheer inability to believe that anything so preposterously old (anywhere from thousands to millions to billions of years old, depending on who you ask) could have retained notions of gender or sexuality or any of that other petty bullshit humans spend so much time tying themselves into knots over.

“Another few drops, if you would,” she hears it say to Ellen, easing an empty glass across the bartop. Ellen knows what she’s dealing with – it’s never even bothered with the pretense of a car, just waits until all the other patrons are either gone or dead asleep, then slips away with the flashing shadow of wings and great beats of air that are heard but never felt. That’s how they really knew it was an angel in the first place; there’s nothing else to give it away.

When Jo asked if they should call the Winchesters, Ellen had just shrugged and shook her head, saying “he ain’t hurting anyone. Not even really hiding – no more‘n he has to in a bar full of trigger-happy hunters.” She’d stared off into the dust motes dancing over the floor, brow wrinkled, mouth pursed. “I’d love to know what he wants, but maybe he’s just… curious or somethin’.”

“Maybe it’s Falling,” Jo had offered. (Male skin aside, she still didn’t consider it mundane enough to assign a gender pronoun.) Neither of them really knew how Falling really worked – no human did – but… “could be a long process. Might be it’s just trying to amuse itself and stay off Heaven’s radar in the time it’s got left.”

She and Ellen had looked at each other for a long moment while her mother’s eyebrows shot skyward. “Now why the hell would he do that? Why come here? Plenty of bars and strip clubs all over the world where he’s less likely to get found out – and shot, no less.”

But Jo had thought of the angel’s bright, weary gaze, and spilled out an answer as soon as it entered her head: “Maybe it wants to be found out.”

“Your shot, doll-face.”

Jo blinks and shakes her head, turning her attention back to the pool table in front of her. The man she’s up against isn’t a hunter, just a thickset biker with a shaved head, handlebar mustache, and tough-guy tattoos, one of a million others in the continental US. He’s easily twice her age, but a newcomer to Harvelle’s – doesn’t know Jo as anything more than some delicate bar-girl thinking she can run with the big dogs.

Only the 8 ball is left on the felt. As she sinks it, Jo can feel the angel’s eyes on her profile, all the way across the room from the bar. When she turns her head, she catches a hint of a smile while her opponent huffs out his frustration.

“Clever little witch,” the biker calls her, after flicking a glance towards Ellen – busy mixing up something with a lot of vodka at the bar, her back facing them. He doesn’t seem to notice the angel watching them. “Think you can handle yourself pretty well, eh?”

Jo doesn’t answer, just hold out her hand for his money.

He takes a step closer. “Maybe I got a little something else for you to handle.”

Jo blinks.

“You like that idea, sweetie? Little extra fun for all? C’mon with me, gorgeous. C’mere.” He reaches, not for her hand, but for her wrist. “Tell me, girlie…” His fingers lock tight around her forearm.

Quick as instinct, Jo twists in his grip, lunging towards him and using her momentum to wrench his elbow around and pin it against the pool table, while her free hand flips out the knife that she’d tucked into her waistband.

There’s a click-clack of warning, and every head turns towards the bar, where Ellen has a double-barreled shotgun braced against her shoulder. “You let go of my daughter, or we’re gonna have an issue.”

The steel vice around Jo’s wrist loosens with remarkable speed.

Ellen jerks her chin towards the door. “Out.”

The biker doesn’t need telling twice; fifteen seconds after the door slams behind him, there’s the roar of a Harley being gunned out of the lot.

In the resounding silence that follows, the angel at the bar leans back in its seat, shoulders loosening, and grins at Jo like a cat that’s just finished digesting the fifteen-hundred dollar canary. One hunter spits, another mutters something along the lines of “fucking bikers,” a third pitches a dart at the board, and, just like that, the Roadhouse snaps back into the rollicking motion of a Saturday night.

Chin up, shoulders tight, back straight, Jo marches across the room and plants herself atop the stool next to the angel. “What’s your name?” she demands.

The angel chuckles into its Scotch before setting the glass down and shifting in its seat to face her. “My passport would tell you Sebastian,” it murmurs, making her lean in close to hear, “but the correct answer would be Balthazar.” Its accent is some weird amalgamation of European countries – she picks out distinct undertones of both British and French, but that’s all she can figure out.

Jo’s first thought – after the accent – is of the maegi from the Bible, her second of the last king of Babylon, and her third of a string of Shakespeare characters. She wonders what that says about the creature’s significance. Balthazar is watching her, waiting for a response. “I don’t know you,” she finally says.

He – it – smiles gently, crow’s feet fanning out. “That’s the point.”

The vessel isn’t old, per se – probably approaching fifty, but the body’s soul (or maybe Balthazar – who knows how long he’s been in there?) was clearly fond of physical activity. There’s self-assured power practically exuding from every pore. Jo wonders if that’s Balthazar’s Grace, or just Sebastian’s musculature talking.

“Why are you here?”

The question seems to amuse Balthazar. He – it – sips at the Scotch once more. “Why not?”

“Don’t be an ass.” That gets a raised eyebrow, and Jo considers backpedaling for all of three nanoseconds before bulling onwards. “Why’d you come here? Someone… someone else recognizes what you are, you’re gonna get nothing but an ass full of lead.”

One finger rocks the glass in a slow circle on the bartop, amber liquid catching the overhead lights. Balthazar watches it while speaking. “A little bit of your mundane metal isn’t going to kill me, darling.”

The pet name strikes too close to the biker; Jo leans back in her seat. “Don’t call me that.”

Balthazar’s mouth sets into a thin line. He lifts a hand, wrist flicking as he airily snaps his fingers, then rests his arm against the edge of the bar once more.

Jo sits silent for a long second. “What did you just do?”

The glass gets drained in one fell swoop. “Severed the connection between a black 2000 Dyna Superglide Harley Davidson’s handlebars and its front wheels. Your friend from earlier is currently sitting in the bottom of a cement culvert with a rather nasty bump on the head, and his mobile appears to have been washed away.”

Pouring out another round of Scotch as soon as the glass touches the bar again, Ellen grunts. “I’d rather have shot him.” She waves away the proffered bills. “This one’s on the house.”

Balthazar’s eyes narrow, then relax. “Yes. Well. It’s a bit tricky to file murder charges against a piece of machinery, so I’d consider this the preferable outcome.” He raises his glass, smiling at Jo over the rim. “And look what it got me.”

She rolls her eyes. “Free booze?”

“Very expensive free booze. And some rather stimulating company.”

“All I’ve done is ask questions that you don’t seem keen on answering.”

“I told you what happened to the fellow from earlier, didn’t I?”

“You’re dodging the point again.”

And now Balthazar’s smile unfurls into a full-blown wicked grin that makes the corners of Jo’s mouth twitch up on instinct when it’s trained on her. “But, you see, that’s my point exactly.”


End file.
